ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the main ideas introduced into the subject, first from America and more recently from Europe, and at British reaction to them, and tries to see what can be said about the reasons for these developments, and the extent of their acceptance. David Clarke had himself been working towards a reformation of archaeology, which he saw as chaotically unsystematic, undisciplined, intuitive and empirical. Shennan has emphasised, however, Clarke's concern for the analysis of culture, which may have seemed like the final days of the old Childean tradition, did at least show an interest in culture for its own sake, something which was largely missing from much of the processual archaeology that was to come, and which had to be rediscovered subsequently. The archaeological record, in so far as it is comprised of items of material culture, therefore, is not a passive reflection of past behaviour, but a meaningfully constituted part of past social action.
